Ulric B. and Evelyn L. Bray Social Sciences Seminar

Abstract: We characterize the distributions of posterior quantiles under a given prior. Unlike the distributions of posterior means, which are known to be mean-preserving contractions of the prior, the distributions of posterior quantiles coincide with a first-order stochastic dominance interval bounded by an upper and a lower truncation of the prior. We apply this characterization to several environments, ranging across political economy, Bayesian persuasion, industrial organization, econometrics, finance, and accounting.